III. GROTESQUE RENAISSANCE 169

terribleness taken from the life; a spectre which the workman indeed saw, and which, as it appalled him, will appeal us also. But the other workman never felt any Divine fear; he never shuddered when he heard the cry from the burning towers of the earth,

“Venga Medusa; ś lo farem di smalto.”

He is stone already, and needs no gentle hand laid upon his eyes to save him.¹

§ 48. I do not mean what I say in this place to apply to the creations of the imagination. It is not as the creating, but as the seeing man, that we are here contemplating the master of the true grotesque. It is because the dreadfulness of the universe around him weighs upon his heart that his work is wild; and therefore through the whole of it we shall find the evidence of deep insight into nature. His beasts and birds, however monstrous, will have profound relations with the true. He may be an ignorant man, and little acquainted with the laws of nature; he is certainly a busy man, and has not much time to watch nature; but he never saw a serpent cross his path, nor a bird flit across the sky, nor a lizard bask upon a stone, without learning so much of the sublimity and inner nature of each as will not suffer him thenceforth to conceive them coldly. He may not be able to carve plumes or scales well; but his creatures will bite and fly, for all that. The ignoble workman is the very reverse of this. He never felt, never looked at nature; and if he endeavour to imitate the work of the other, all his touches will be made at random, and all his extravagances will be ineffective; he may knit brows, and twist lips, and lengthen beaks, and sharpen teeth,

¹ [The quotation is from the Inferno, ix. 53: “Hasten Medusa, so shall we change him to adamant,” and the subsequent reference is to the following lines:-

“‘Turn thyself round, and keep

Thy countenance hid; for if the Gorgon dire

Be shown and thou shouldst view it, thy return

Upwards would be for ever lost.’ This said,

Himself my gentle master, turn’d me round;

Nor trusted he my hand, but with his own

He also hid me.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]